Wednesday, 23 September 2015

Where’s William?

“William?” scowled the security
guard.

“Yes,” I replied, with a bright and
cheerful enthusiasm which, in hindsight, may have been a bit of a mistake. “Can
you tell me where to find William?”

He viewed me suspiciously, as if
trying to weigh up, from my eagerness, whether I was an idiot or a
troublemaker. I had naïvely assumed that everybody in the museum would know
William and his whereabouts. As the security guard looked me over warily, it
belatedly dawned on me that, however obvious it might be to me who William was,
this crucial piece of intelligence might just have escaped the security guard.

“The hippo,” I explained, in what
I had hoped would be a helpful way, but which I soon realised only made matters worse.
In response, the security guard’s expression abruptly shifted gear again, from
suspicion to low-level alarm, and I started to wonder as to the advisability of
going on with our conversation. However good my intentions, it looked like continuing
the discussion might only have the effect of antagonising him further.

“Hippo?” he repeated, testing the
word sceptically, much as one might sip cautiously at a drink offered by a
stranger of whose bona fides one has reason to doubt.

“Yes! William’s a statue of a
hippo,” I elaborated. He blinked at me, the dim and distant light of vague
recognition slowly coming to his worried eye.

“What era?” he asked, suddenly.

“Uh,” I thought. “Egyptian?”

He thought for a bit. Finally, he
nodded and pointed back to The Great Hall and to anther entrance at the far
side.

“North Wing,” he said. “Try
there.”

Relieved to be able to stop being
such an obvious source of annoyance and frustration for him, I thanked him and
made my way through the thronging visitors in The Great Hall. Showing my ticket
again, I passed further security guards, who were busily engaged in frowning at
people with backpacks, and into the gallery of Egyptian art.

In a museum as grand and
expansive as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, narrowing one’s field of enquiry
to a single wing, particularly if one is looking for a small ceramic
hippopotamus, is not quite as helpful as you might imagine. It does help to be
in the right section of the building, of course, but as I wandered past
mummies, statues of Anubis and, to some surprise, The Temple of Dendur
(complete with Napoleonic graffiti), I started to lose heart in the enterprise.
It was only a small hippo, after all, but I had wanted to see it.

Finally, as I started to make my
way back towards the entrance, having all but given up hope, I saw him. He was
standing in an unostentatious glass cabinet, at one side of an otherwise
unremarkable room, for all the world just minding his own business and watching
the visitors go by.

William (or “Figure of a
Hippopotamus” as he is referred to, with commendable understatement, in the Met
catalogue) is barely more than 11 cm tall and is glazed in a vivid aquamarine
and patterned with lotus flowers. He is from Egypt and is nearly four thousand
years old. For most of the last hundred years, having been gifted by Edward S.
Harkness in 1917, he has been at the Met in New York.

For an object of such antiquity,
William has an endearingly sprightly charm. He stands, looking out of his glass
case with a curiously benign expression of bemused indulgence, as if he had
spent the last century casually watching the comings and goings of visitors to
his new home. Maybe it is his broad snout that appeals, or possibly his
pleasingly stumpy feet, which make him look like a puppy standing to attention,
but whatever it is, he appears to be a hippo that is pleased to meet you.

As the unofficial mascot of the
Met, I had assumed that William would have a display case all to himself, and
be the centre of attention, but I was the only one at that moment who was
looking at him.